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Don’t Stop Moving

One of my favourite blogs this year has been Jen's Perfect In Our Imperfections. Sometimes you get lucky and find someone on the other side of the world who seems to be working through the same issues as you and is articulating thoughts you didn't even know you were thinking. In this case, it's been the JOY of maintenance. I enjoyed her take on That Oprah Article today:

"The thing that we both forgot, that most of us don't realize, is that we can't just grab onto the new set of circumstances and hold on for dear life. We have to keep moving forward, keep letting go, keep rolling with new circumstances. That's why weight maintenance is so hard, I think. It's easier to take risks to move toward a big exciting goal and an imagined better life. It's harder to keep living in the present when you realize it's not just one big shining moment where you feel great all the time. You can't 'conquer this battle once and for all,' you can just keep living and working through your new stuff."

. . .

Hope you had a Merry Christmas, if you're Christmasly inclined! If not, hope your December 25th was generally ace.

16 thoughts on “Don’t Stop Moving”

Hope yours was ace too. We walked round the Botanics today and I thought about you (not all the time, I mean. That would be creepy. But you once posted pics of you there and I vaguely wondered what I would do if you came along. Probably nothing. Just look at you and then the moment would pass).

I didn’t mean that I wouldn’t do anything because you were so boring!! I mean, I would be trying to think of something really interesting to say and then you would have walked on and I wouldn’t have the nerve.

This is very true. There are a couple of quotes that come to mind for me.

The first is, “It is what it is.”

People often get frustrated with this quote, but, underneath the covers, it is deeply profound. It means that in that moment, what happened took place, and nothing can change that; it’s what you do in the next moment that matters.

The other is to “control what you can control, and the rest will come.”

This is probably my favorite, insofar as it is my own personal philosophy. I realize that I can only control so much, the rest is out of my hands. If I take care of the stuff in my sphere of influence, then everything else will work itself out.

The analogy I use for both of those quotes is test taking. The wrong time to worry about your test score is after you hand it in, though many, if not most, people worry MORE after the test has been passed in. At that point, it is what it is, and beyond your control.

The right time to worry about it is before you take it, or, if you forgot that principle, right after it is handed back! The score is what it is, time to start focusing on the next test.

Maintanence is always the part I struggle with. I have managed to lose weight on occasion without noticing it, but then will continue to plow through food and not exercise and suddenly it is all back where it started.

After spending the latter part of this year moaning about my growing size, I have decided that I need to mean it when I say I want to lose weight and actually do something about it. Willpower has never been a friend of mine. But a visit from a friend who looks amazing because she works at her weight has made me realise how much I have let myself go. None of my clothes fit and it’s making me miserable.

And so!

Decided to work towards running/stumbling/crawling the Great Scottish Run in Central Park, NY on April 1st. It’s a 10k, so even to hobble over the finish line would be an achievement. Hopefully this will give me something to work towards now and will actually get me in the gym of an evening and keep off the gigantic cookies!

That’s a great thought you quoted. It is so much easier to plod toward a goal, but once you reach it, not only is it harder to stay there, but you really hit the reasons as to why it’s harder! I guess I expect my life to change significantly because I can fit into cuter clothes, or do a wider variety of physical activities, but the truth of the matter is that I will just continue to find the next thing I need to do to improve myself, or the world around me. It IS a continuation. It always is.